Yep. Half of these spam messages, I see with green sign on top. I dunno how it looks from other accounts, but there's like five new pages of spam, both waiting for approval and ordinary, on every topic. First day, 200 new requests for approval. Second day, 400. Next two days, 2000 each.

One of admins is on it though, since I see someone's been tampering with the approval panel, trying to make it more functional.

You know what I noticed? 90% of spam messages have subject entered. On the other hand, most of real users don't enter subject, so I assume bots are written to fill out every form field they find.That's an intriguing thought.

IVstudios wrote:I only see one spam post in this thread (well, on the lost two pages of it, anyway) .I knew the spam was bad, but I had no idea it was 4,000 post in a few days bad.

Can you bulk-delete all a users post from the "waiting for approval" list like you can from normal threads? That might make it less daunting. Or are all 4,000 from unique users?

They are unique users, and it's like yangzhongge3, yangzhongg51, yangzhongge3, yangzhongg65 ,yangzhongg27... Mod panel is a bit erratic so search doesn't always work the way it should (so it doesn't help to, for instance, search for all posts in GD). Till today, I could only disaprove 5 posts at a time, but one of the admins tampered with it so now it's something like 20 posts at a time - even with that I didn't have time to clean half of it today.

The worst thing is that with any bulk disproving, risk of rejecting every real user along with the false ones grows.

Can you ban by IP? Even if the bots are making multiple users, they should all be coming from the same IP address, right? (I'm just guessing, I don't really know) Do an IP ban on one yangzhongg## and it should get rid of them all.

IVstudios wrote:Can you ban by IP? Even if the bots are making multiple users, they should all be coming from the same IP address, right? (I'm just guessing, I don't really know) Do an IP ban on one yangzhongg## and it should get rid of them all.

It's not necessarily a rule, I suppose the same program might operate from different machines it hijacked with a trojan. In any case, it doesn't solve the problem of how to delete several hundreds of such accounts, and the the next day you have several thousands of spammers from different ip.

Too bad there isn't a macro saying potential members with non-actual names get denied. Seems like all the spammers that make it through have names like "kehbsh" or "ejnther." Hell, having a macro to weed out foreign language spammers would at least take care of all the Russian posters.

"I've come to accept a lot of what's wrong with this world, and there's not much I can do about it." - Johnny "Rotten" Lydon

It's like getting used to having lamps again after not having power for a while I can actually log in and see relevant things without digging vainly wondering if I missed someone's comment under all the spam!! Thanks Kisai!